Case Study: City of Virginia Beach

Stratus

OrganizationTen million visitors a year visit VBgov.com, the official Web site for the City of Virginia Beach. There, they can access online services, information, and forms related to everything from garbage collection to paying their water bill. Prior to implementing the Google Search Appliance, VBgov.com visitors had a tough time finding the information they needed. City Webmaster Jay Agnew admits that the site's previous search capabilities were lacking. 

Approach Agnew says more than 90 percent of people who visit the city's site find what they need via search, and he's a big fan because he can put the entire contents of a site at the visitor's fingertips. "Our website is only as good as our search capabilities," notes Agnew.

The move to the Google Search Appliance was an easy decision. "Google is the number one search engine in the world, and we wanted to harness that same power for our site," he says. While implementing Google Search Appliance, the city also redesigned its site to be more search-friendly.

Results Agnew reports that the time required to interface the Google Search Appliance to the city's back-end CMS system was "very short," and that he and his team have also used the Google Search Appliance for five other sites, including the City of Virginia Beach Schools and the sheriff's office.

Concludes Agnew, "The relevancy of the results from the Google Search Appliance has reduced calls to our 24-hour contact center and enabled us to provide better service to citizens."

About the Google Search Appliance The Google Search Appliance is an integrated hardware and software search solution that extends Google's award-winning search technology to websites of all kinds, including corporate sites and intranets. Organizations can use Google Search Appliance to make data on servers, content management systems, databases and business applications instantly and securely available from a single familiar search box. More than 7,000 companies worldwide use Google Search Appliance or Google Mini, Google's small business search solution.